By
Henry James

There is perhaps no novelist of alien race who more naturally
than Ivan Turgenev inherits a niche in a Library for English
readers; and this not because of any advance or concession that
in his peculiar artistic independence he ever made, or could
dream of making, such readers, but because it was one of the
effects of his peculiar genius to give him, even in his
lifetime, a special place in the regard of foreign publics. His
position is in this respect singular; for it is his Russian
savor that as much as anything has helped generally to
domesticate him.

Born in 1818, at Orel in the heart of Russia, and dying in
1883, at Bougival near Paris, he had spent in Germany and France
the latter half of his life; and had incurred in his own country
in some degree the reprobation that is apt to attach to the
absent--the penalty they pay for such extension or such
beguilement as they may have happened to find over the border.
He belonged to the class of large rural proprietors of land and
of serfs; and with his ample patrimony, offered one of the few
examples of literary labor achieved in high independence of the
question of gain--a character that he shares with his
illustrious contemporary Tolstoy, who is of a type in other
respects so different. It may give us an idea of his primary
situation to imagine some large Virginian or Carolinian
slaveholder, during the first half of the century, inclining to
'Northern' views; and becoming (though not predominantly
under pressure of these, but rather by the operation of an
exquisite genius) the great American novelist--one of the great
novelists of the world. Born under a social and political order
sternly repressive, all Turgenev's deep instincts, all his
moral passion, placed him on the liberal side; with the
consequence that early in life, after a period spent at a German
university, he found himself, through the accident of a trifling
public utterance, under such suspicion in high places as to be
sentenced to a term of tempered exile--confinement to his own
estate. It was partly under these circumstances perhaps that he
gathered material for the work from the appearance of which his
reputation dates--A Sportsman's Sketches, published
in two volumes in 1852. This admirable collection of impressions
of homely country life, as the old state of servitude had made
it, is often spoken of as having borne to the great decree of
Alexander II the relation borne by Mrs. Beecher Stowe's
famous novel to the emancipation of the Southern slaves.
Incontestably, at any rate, Turgenev's rustic studies
sounded, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, a particular hour:
with the difference, however, of not having at the time produced
an agitation--of having rather presented the case with an art
too insidious for instant recognition, an art that stirred the
depths more than the surface.

The author was designated promptly enough, at any rate, for
such influence as might best be exercised at a distance: he
travelled, he lived abroad; early in the sixties he was settled
in Germany; he acquired property at Baden-Baden, and spent there
the last years of the prosperous period--in the history of the
place--of which the Franco-Prussian War was to mark the violent
term. He cast in his lot after that event mainly with the
victims of the lost cause; setting up a fresh home in
Paris--near which city he had, on the Seine, a charming
alternate residence--and passing in it, and in the country, save
for brief revisitations, the remainder of his days. His
friendships, his attachments, in the world of art and of
letters, were numerous and distinguished; he never married; he
produced, as the years went on, without precipitation or
frequency; and these were the years during which his reputation
gradually established itself as, according to the phrase,
European--a phrase denoting in this case, perhaps, a public more
alert in the United States even than elsewhere.

Tolstoy, his junior by ten years, had meanwhile come to
fruition; though, as in fact happened, it was not till after
Turgenev's death that the greater fame of War and
Peace and of Anna Karenina began to be blown about
the world. One of the last acts of the elder writer, performed
on his deathbed, was to address to the other (from whom for a
considerable term he had been estranged by circumstances
needless to reproduce) an appeal to return to the exercise of
the genius that Tolstoy had already so lamentably, so
monstrously forsworn. 'I am on my death-bed; there is no
possibility of my recovery. I write you expressly to tell you
how happy I have been to be your contemporary, and to utter my
last, my urgent prayer. Come back, my friend, to your literary
labors. That gift came to you from the source from which all
comes to us. Ah, how happy I should be could I think you would
listen to my entreaty! My friend, great writer of our Russian
land, respond to it, obey it!' These words, among the most
touching surely ever addressed by one great spirit to another,
throw an indirect light--perhaps I may even say a direct
one--upon the nature and quality of Turgenev's artistic
temperament; so much so that I regret being without opportunity,
in this place, to gather such aid for a portrait of him as might
be supplied by following out the unlikeness between the pair. It
would be too easy to say that Tolstoy was, from the Russian
point of view, for home consumption, and Turgenev for foreign:
War and Peace has probably had more readers in Europe and
America than A House of Gentlefolk or On the
Eve
or Smoke--a circumstance less detrimental than it may
appear to my claim of our having, in the Western world,
supremely adopted the author of the latter works. Turgenev is in
a peculiar degree what I may call the novelists'
novelist--an artistic influence extraordinarily valuable and
ineradicably established. The perusal of Tolstoy--a wonderful
mass of life--is an immense event, a kind of splendid accident,
for each of us: his name represents nevertheless no such eternal
spell of method, no such quiet irresistibility of presentation,
as shines, close to us and lighting our possible steps, in that
of his precursor. Tolstoy is a reflector as vast as a natural
lake; a monster harnessed to his great subject--all human
life!--as an elephant might be harnessed, for purposes of
traction, not to a carriage, but to a coach-house. His own case
is prodigious, but his example for others dire: disciples not
elephantine he can only mislead and betray.

One by one, for thirty years, with a firm, deliberate hand,
with intervals and patiences and waits, Turgenev pricked in his
sharp outlines. His great external mark is probably his
concision: an ideal he never threw over--it shines most perhaps
even when he is least brief--and that he often applied with a
rare felicity. He has masterpieces of a few pages; his perfect
things are sometimes his least prolonged. He abounds in short
tales, episodes clipped as by the scissors of Atropos; but for a
direct translation of the whole we have still to wait--depending
meanwhile upon the French and German versions, which have been,
instead of the original text (thanks to the paucity among us of
readers of Russian), the source of several published in English.
For the novels and A Sportsman's Sketches we depend
upon the nine volumes (1897) of Mrs. Garnett. We touch here upon
the remarkable side, to our vision, of the writer's
fortune--the anomaly of his having constrained to intimacy even
those who are shut out from the enjoyment of his medium, for
whom that question is positively prevented from existing.
Putting aside extrinsic intimations, it is impossible to read
him without the conviction of his being, in the vividness of his
own tongue, of the strong type of those made to bring home to us
the happy truth of the unity, in a generous talent, of material
and form--of their being inevitable faces of the same medal; the
type of those, in a word, whose example deals death to the
perpetual clumsy assumption that subject and style
are--aesthetically speaking, or in the living work--different
and separable things. We are conscious, reading him in a
language not his own, of not being reached by his personal tone,
his individual accent.

It is a testimony therefore to the intensity of his presence,
that so much of his particular charm does reach us; that the
mask turned to us has, even without his expression, still so
much beauty. It is the beauty (since we must try to formulate)
of the finest presentation of the familiar. His vision is of the
world of character and feeling, the world of the relations life
throws up at every hour and on every spot; he deals little, on
the whole, in the miracles of chance--the hours and spots over
the edge of time and space; his air is that of the great central
region of passion and motive, of the usual, the inevitable, the
intimate--the intimate for weal or woe. No theme that he ever
chooses but strikes us as full; yet with all have we the sense
that their animation comes from within, and is not pinned to
their backs like the pricking objects used of old in the
horse-races of the Roman carnival, to make the animals run.
Without a patch of 'plot' to draw blood, the story he
mainly tells us, the situation he mainly gives, runs as if for
dear life. His first book was practically full evidence of what,
if we have to specify, is finest in him--the effect, for the
commonest truth, of an exquisite envelope of poetry. In this
medium of feeling--full, as it were, of all the echoes and
shocks of the universal danger and need--everything in him goes
on; the sense of fate and folly and pity and wonder and beauty.
The tenderness, the humor, the variety of A Sportsman's
Sketches revealed on the spot an observer with a rare
imagination. These faculties had attached themselves, together,
to small things and to great: to the misery, the simplicity, the
piety, the patience, of the unemancipated peasant; to all the
natural wonderful life of earth and air and winter and summer
and field and forest; to queer apparitions of country neighbors,
of strange local eccentrics; to old-world practices and
superstitions; to secrets gathered and types disinterred and
impressions absorbed in the long, close contacts with man and
nature involved in the passionate pursuit of game. Magnificent
in stature and original vigor, Turgenev, with his love of the
chase, or rather perhaps of the inspiration he found in it,
would have been the model of the mighty hunter, had not such an
image been a little at variance with his natural mildness, the
softness that often accompanies the sense of an extraordinary
reach of limb and play of muscle. He was in person the model
rather of the strong man at rest: massive and towering, with the
voice of innocence and the smile almost of childhood. What
seemed still more of a contradiction to so much of him, however,
was that his work was all delicacy and fancy, penetration and
compression.

If I add, in their order of succession, Rudin, Fathers and
Children, Spring Floods, and Virgin Soil, to the
three novels I have (also in their relation of time) named
above, I shall have indicated the larger blocks of the compact
monument, with a base resting deep and interstices well filled,
into which that work disposes itself. The list of his minor
productions is too long to draw out: I can only mention, as a
few of the most striking--A Correspondence, The Wayside Inn,
The Brigadier, The Dog, The Jew, Visions, Mumu, Three Meetings,
A First Love, The Forsaken, Assia, The Journal of a Superfluous
Man, The Story of Lieutenant Yergunov, A King Lear of the
Steppe. The first place among his novels would be difficult
to assign: general opinion probably hesitates between A House
of Gentlefolk and Fathers and Children. My own
predilection is great for the exquisite On the Eve;
though I admit that in such a company it draws no supremacy from
being exquisite. What is less contestable is that Virgin
Soil--published shortly before his death, and the longest of
his fictions--has, although full of beauty, a minor
perfection.

Character, character expressed and exposed, is in all these
things what we inveterately find. Turgenev's sense of it was
the great light that artistically guided him; the simplest
account of him is to say that the mere play of it constitutes in
every case his sufficient drama. No one has had a closer vision,
or a hand at once more ironic and more tender, for the
individual figure. He sees it with its minutest signs and
tricks--all its heredity of idiosyncrasies, all its particulars
of weakness and strength, of ugliness and beauty, of oddity and
charm; and yet it is of his essence that he sees it in the
general flood of life, steeped in its relations and contacts,
struggling or submerged, a hurried particle in the stream. This
gives him, with his quiet method, his extraordinary breadth;
dissociates his rare power to particularize from dryness or
hardness, from any peril of caricature. He understands so much
that we almost wonder he can express anything; and his
expression is indeed wholly in absolute projection, in
illustration, in giving of everything the unexplained and
irresponsible specimen. He is of a spirit so human that we
almost wonder at his control of his matter; of a pity so deep
and so general that we almost wonder at his curiosity. The
element of poetry in him is constant, and yet reality stares
through it without the loss of a wrinkle. No one has more of
that sign of the born novelist which resides in a respect
unconditioned for the freedom and vitality, the absoluteness
when summoned, of the creatures he invokes; or is more superior
to the strange and second-rate policy of explaining or
presenting them by reprobation or apology--of taking the short
cuts and anticipating the emotions and judgments about them that
should be left, at the best, to the perhaps not most intelligent
reader. And yet his system, as it may summarily be called, of
the mere particularized report, has a lucidity beyond the virtue
of the cruder moralist.

If character, as I say, is what he gives us at every turn, I
should speedily add that he offers it not in the least as a
synonym, in our Western sense, of resolution and prosperity. It
wears the form of the almost helpless detachment of the
short-sighted individual soul; and the perfection of his
exhibition of it is in truth too often but the intensity of
what, for success, it just does not produce. What works in him
most is the question of the will; and the most constant
induction he suggests, bears upon the sad figure that principle
seems mainly to make among his countrymen. He had seen--he
suggests to us--its collapse in a thousand quarters; and the
most general tragedy, to his view, is that of its desperate
adventures and disasters, its inevitable abdication and defeat.
But if the men, for the most part, let it go, it takes refuge in
the other sex; many of the representatives of which, in his
pages, are supremely strong--in wonderful addition, in various
cases, to being otherwise admirable. This is true of such a
number--the younger women, the girls, the 'heroines' in
especial--that they form in themselves, on the ground of moral
beauty, of the finest distinction of soul, one of the most
striking groups the modern novel has given us. They are heroines
to the letter, and of a heroism obscure and undecorated: it is
almost they alone who have the energy to determine and to act.
Elena, Lisa, Tatyana, Gemma, Marianna-- we can write their names
and call up their images, but I lack space to take them in turn.
It is by a succession of the finest and tenderest touches that
they live; and this, in all Turgenev's work, is the process
by which he persuades and succeeds.

It was his own view of his main danger that he sacrificed too
much to detail; was wanting in composition, in the gift that
conduces to unity of impression. But no novelist is closer and
more cumulative; in none does distinction spring from a quality
of truth more independent of everything but the subject, but the
idea itself. This idea, this subject, moreover--a spark kindled
by the innermost friction of things--is always as interesting as
an unopened telegram. The genial freedom--with its exquisite
delicacy--of his approach to this 'innermost' world, the
world of our finer consciousness, has in short a side that I can
only describe and commemorate as nobly disinterested; a side
that makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us in
comparison by violent means, and introduce us in comparison to
vulgar things.